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Dramatic and far-reaching changes have occurred in the lives of
Chinese women in the years since the death of Mao and the fall of
the Gang of Four During the decade of the Cultural Revolution,
attention to personal life was regarded as 'bourgeois'; in the
post-Mao decade, abrupt turns in public policy made discussion of
personal life imperative, and nowhere has this been more evident
than in the debate about the role of women in Chinese society. This
book is based on extensive personal viewing of urban women and
study of contemporary literature and articles in the periodical
press that touched on the problems of rural women. It is not only
about the changes in women's lives but also about the excitement,
confusion, and anxieties that Chinese women express as they
contemplate the future of their society and their own place in it.
Each chapter is devoted to one aspect of women's Lives: girlhood,
adornment and sexuality, courtship, marriage, family relations,
divorce, work, violence against women, and gender inequality.
Giving a personal dimension to the issues discussed, the chapters
close with a rich sampling of excerpts from the newly thriving
women's press and other contemporary publications. Although many
women in China still suffer discrimination in working life and
mistreatment in the family, they can now raise questions that would
have been unthinkable even ten years ago. Most notably, they can
and do use the press to voice complaints, expose injustices, seek
advice, and support or deplore the social changes of the 1980's.
This is the story of the workers of Tianjin (Tientsin) and how, in
the first half of the twentieth century, they helped shape
Tianjin's identity as the major industrial center of North China.
Dramatic and far-reaching changes have occurred in the lives of
Chinese women in the years since the death of Mao and the fall of
the Gang of Four During the decade of the Cultural Revolution,
attention to personal life was regarded as 'bourgeois'; in the
post-Mao decade, abrupt turns in public policy made discussion of
personal life imperative, and nowhere has this been more evident
than in the debate about the role of women in Chinese society. This
book is based on extensive personal viewing of urban women and
study of contemporary literature and articles in the periodical
press that touched on the problems of rural women. It is not only
about the changes in women's lives but also about the excitement,
confusion, and anxieties that Chinese women express as they
contemplate the future of their society and their own place in it.
Each chapter is devoted to one aspect of women's Lives: girlhood,
adornment and sexuality, courtship, marriage, family relations,
divorce, work, violence against women, and gender inequality.
Giving a personal dimension to the issues discussed, the chapters
close with a rich sampling of excerpts from the newly thriving
women's press and other contemporary publications. Although many
women in China still suffer discrimination in working life and
mistreatment in the family, they can now raise questions that would
have been unthinkable even ten years ago. Most notably, they can
and do use the press to voice complaints, expose injustices, seek
advice, and support or deplore the social changes of the 1980's.
What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly
marginalized groupOCorural womenOCoat the center of the inquiry? In
this book, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of
seventy-two elderly women in rural Shaanxi province during the
revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Interweaving these
womenOCOs life histories with insightful analysis, Hershatter shows
how Party-state policy became local and personal, and how it
affected womenOCOs agricultural work, domestic routines, activism,
marriage, childbirth, and parentingOCoeven their notions of virtue
and respectability. The women narrate their pasts from the vantage
point of the present and highlight their enduring virtues,
important achievements, and most deeply harbored grievances. In
showing what memories can tell us about gender as an axis of power,
difference, and collectivity in 1950s rural China and the present,
Hershatter powerfully examines the nature of socialism and how
gender figured in its creation."
This classic in the annals of village studies will be widely read
and debated for what it reveals about China's rural dynamics as
well as the nature of state power, markets, the military, social
relations, and religion. Built on extraordinarily intimate and
detailed research in a Sichuan village that Isabel Crook began in
1940, the book provides an unprecedented history of Chinese rural
life during the war with Japan. It is an essential resource for all
scholars of contemporary China.
What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly
marginalized group - rural women - at the center of the inquiry? In
this book, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of
seventy-two elderly women in rural Shaanxi province during the
revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Interweaving these
women's life histories with insightful analysis, Hershatter shows
how Party-state policy became local and personal, and how it
affected women's agricultural work, domestic routines, activism,
marriage, childbirth, and parenting - even their notions of virtue
and respectability. The women narrate their pasts from the vantage
point of the present and highlight their enduring virtues,
important achievements, and most deeply harbored grievances. In
showing what memories can tell us about gender as an axis of power,
difference, and collectivity in 1950s rural China and the present,
Hershatter powerfully examines the nature of socialism and how
gender figured in its creation.
This pioneering work examines prostitution in Shanghai from the
late nineteenth century to the present. Drawn mostly from the
daughters and wives of the working poor and declasse elites,
prostitutes in Shanghai were near the bottom of class and gender
hierarchies. Yet they were central figures in Shanghai urban life,
entering the historical record whenever others wanted to
appreciate, castigate, count, regulate, cure, pathologize, warn
about, rescue, eliminate, or deploy them as a symbol in a larger
social panorama.
Over the past century, prostitution has been understood in many
ways: as a source of urbanized pleasures, a profession full of
unscrupulous and greedy schemers, a changing site of work for
women, a source of moral danger and physical disease, a marker of
national decay, and a sign of modernity. For the Communist
leadership of the 1950s, the elimination of prostitution symbolized
China's emergence as a strong, healthy, and modern nation. In the
past decade, as prostitution once again has become a recognized
feature of Chinese society, it has been incorporated into a larger
public discussion about what kind of modernity China should seek
and what kind of sex and gender arrangements should characterize
that modernity.
Prostitutes, like every other non-elite group, did not record their
own lives. How can sources generated by intense public argument
about the "larger" meanings of prostitution be read for clues to
those lives? Hershatter makes use of a broad range of materials:
guidebooks to the pleasure quarters, collections of anecdotes about
high-class courtesans, tabloid gossip columns, municipal
regulations prohibiting street soliciting, police interrogations
ofstreetwalkers and those accused of trafficking in women,
newspaper reports on court cases involving both courtesans and
streetwalkers, polemics by Chinese and foreign reformers, learned
articles by Chinese scholars commenting on the world history of
prostitution and analyzing its local causes, surveys by doctors and
social workers on sexually transmitted disease in various Shanghai
populations, relief agency records, fictionalized accounts of the
scams and sufferings of prostitutes, memoirs by former courtesan
house patrons, and interviews with former officials and
reformers.
Although a courtesan may never set pen to paper, we can infer a
great deal about her strategizing and working of the system through
the vast cautionary literature that tells her customers how not to
be defrauded by her. Newspaper accounts of the arrests and brief
court testimonies of Shanghai streetwalkers let us glimpse the way
that prostitutes positioned themselves to get the most they could
from the legal system. Without recourse to direct speech,
Hershatter argues, these women have nevertheless left an audible
trace. Central to this study is the investigation of how things are
known and later remembered, and how, later still, they are
simultaneously apprehended and reinvented by the historian.
If we place women at the center of our account of China's last two
centuries, how does this change our understanding of what happened?
This deeply knowledgeable book illuminates the places where the Big
History of recognizable events intersects with the daily lives of
ordinary people, using gender as its analytic lens. Leading scholar
Gail Hershatter asks how these events affected women in particular,
and how women affected the course of these events. For instance,
did women have a 1911 revolution? A socialist revolution? If so,
what did those revolutions look like? Which women had them?
Hershatter uses two key themes to frame her analysis. The first is
the importance of women's visible and invisible labor. The labor of
women in domestic and public spaces shaped China's move from empire
to republic to socialist nation to rising capitalist power. The
second is the symbolic work performed by gender itself. What women
should do and be was a constant topic of debate during China's
transformation from empire to weak state to partially occupied
territory to nascent socialist republic to reform-era powerhouse.
What sorts of concerns did people express through the language of
gender? How did that language work, and why was it so powerful?
Drawing on decades of Hershatter's groundbreaking scholarship and
mastery of a range of literatures, this beautifully written book
will be essential reading for all students of China's modern
history.
If we place women at the center of our account of China's last two
centuries, how does this change our understanding of what happened?
This deeply knowledgeable book illuminates the places where the Big
History of recognizable events intersects with the daily lives of
ordinary people, using gender as its analytic lens. Leading scholar
Gail Hershatter asks how these events affected women in particular,
and how women affected the course of these events. For instance,
did women have a 1911 revolution? A socialist revolution? If so,
what did those revolutions look like? Which women had them?
Hershatter uses two key themes to frame her analysis. The first is
the importance of women's visible and invisible labor. The labor of
women in domestic and public spaces shaped China's move from empire
to republic to socialist nation to rising capitalist power. The
second is the symbolic work performed by gender itself. What women
should do and be was a constant topic of debate during China's
transformation from empire to weak state to partially occupied
territory to nascent socialist republic to reform-era powerhouse.
What sorts of concerns did people express through the language of
gender? How did that language work, and why was it so powerful?
Drawing on decades of Hershatter's groundbreaking scholarship and
mastery of a range of literatures, this beautifully written book
will be essential reading for all students of China's modern
history.
This classic in the annals of village studies will be widely read
and debated for what it reveals about China's rural dynamics as
well as the nature of state power, markets, the military, social
relations, and religion. Built on extraordinarily intimate and
detailed research in a Sichuan village that Isabel Crook began in
1940, the book provides an unprecedented history of Chinese rural
life during the war with Japan. It is an essential resource for all
scholars of contemporary China.
This indispensable guide for students of both Chinese and women's
history synthesizes recent research on women in twentieth-century
China. Written by a leading historian of China, it surveys more
than 650 scholarly works, discussing Chinese women in the context
of marriage, family, sexuality, labor, and national modernity. In
the process, Hershatter offers keen analytic insights and judgments
about the works themselves and the evolution of related academic
fields. The result is both a practical bibliographic tool and a
thoughtful reflection on how we approach the past.
This first significant collection of essays on women in China in
more than two decades captures a pivotal moment in a
cross-cultural-and interdisciplinary-dialogue. For the first time,
the voices of China-based scholars are heard alongside scholars
positioned in the United States. The distinguished contributors to
this volume are of different generations, hold citizenship in
different countries, and were trained in different disciplines, but
all embrace the shared project of mapping gender in China and
making power-laden relationships visible. The essays take up gender
issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Chapters focus
on learned women in the eighteenth century, the changing status of
contemporary village women, sexuality and reproduction,
prostitution, women's consciousness, women's writing, the gendering
of work, and images of women in contemporary Chinese fiction. Some
of the liveliest disagreements over the usefulness of western
feminist theory and scholarship on China take place between Chinese
working in China and Chinese in temporary or longtime diaspora.
Engendering China will appeal to a broad academic spectrum,
including scholars of Asian studies, critical theory, feminist
studies, cultural studies, and policy studies.
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